The Online Photographer

Things Go Wrong

Not fine, but fun: Barnes & Noble's leather-casebound gift edition of Moby-Dick

I'm making a push to finish Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness so I can say I read a classic novel in '16, in conformance with my New Years resolution of 15 or so years ago. (MarkB and several others recommended that I pick a short book and try to cram for 2016. I'm game.) Kindle says I'm 34% finished, so I have some reading to do today.

The Kindle e-book I downloaded cost nothing, like many classic texts in the public domain. There were a number of choices. I downloaded one that said it was "Illustrated."

It also said it came with a "Free Audiobook." I wasn't able to manage the convoluted series of steps and signups and downloads it would have taken to extract the allegedly free audiobook from the tubes of the internets, but it doesn't matter because apparently the audiobook was an "abridged" version. I always liked that word; I visualize readers bypassing the ravines and chasms of the boring parts of books with the aid of bridges. But abridged...really? Heart of Darkness is a novella, barely longer than a long short story. Faulkner wrote sentences that were longer.

Okay, he didn't really.

And the Kindle book is "illustrated," all right...with JPEGs of what look to be Frederic Remington paintings of American Wild West scenes. (Heart of Darkness is about colonialism in Africa.) They're illustrations, all right—generically, anyway—but they have zero to do with the book. I read almost nothing but e-books these days, but e-books, it must be said, still have quite a bit of evolving left to do. There is a great deal to be said for printed books, which are highly evolved and sometimes rise to the level, even, of art. I'd love to know the process by which these particular illustrations got added to this particular book file. How did that whole process break down so badly?

But what can you say? Things go wrong.

Serviceable plan
Things go wrong, all right. Sometimes I feel like I'm barely keeping up with entropy. My four-and-a-half-year-old washing machine has broken down, and will cost more than half the price of a new one to fix. (Its motherboard went bad. Are you getting that? My washing machine has a motherboard.) It's been broken for two weeks; the part has arrived—the new motherboard—but my next service appointment is on January third.

And not only that, but at the same time, my water heater, which also dates from 2012, went kerplooie and needs to be replaced altogether. You're getting the part about four and a half years, right? Fortunately, the water heater, unlike the washing machine, is still under warranty, so it will be replaced for only a $50 upcharge. (The upcharge is because they don't make 52-gallon tanks any more; the new ones are 50-gallon tanks. A direct replacement would have been free, but they can't make a direct replacement. Another way of looking at that is that it's $25 to me per gallon of diminished capacity, but let's try not to look at it like that.) Counting the plumber's labor charges, I might get out from under that one for less than $300 if I'm lucky. But in the meantime, I haven't been able to wash clothes or sheets for two weeks, and now I can't take a shower or run the dishwasher either. Looks like my little annus horribilis (Latin for "lousy year") is ending with a few little twists of the knife, just to put a cap on things. One last little flourish.

A pox on planned obsolescence. The washing machine vendor wants me to buy an "extended warranty"...for $49 a month. Yes, it would cover all my appliances, but fer Pete's sake. Who do they think they are, Adobe?

You have to put things in perspective, though. A photographer friend who lives in New York City had a gas leak, and the repair has to be approved by City inspectors before his gas can be turned back on...and City inspectors are working on a two-week backlog. So my friend's gas leak is fixed, but he doesn't have heat or hot water until the inspectors get around to him. He says he's taking it one day at a time.

All I have to do is sit at the launderette reading Joseph Conrad illustrated with cowboys and Indians on horseback. Could be worse.

It's almost as if business in general is morphing quietly into an art of gentle, legal extortion. I almost hesitate to mention this, for fear of creating a jinx, but I really hope camera manufacturers aren't sitting around large tables this very minute plotting ways to extract more cash from us with manipulative schemes involving planned obsolescence, extended warranties, service plans, and monthly service fees. Because, really, it's bad enough that I buy a new camera every three years when there's nothing wrong with the old one; but, let's admit, it could be worse.

My e-book copy of Heart of Darkness. It's illustrated!! What a bonus.

The White Whale...and the White Dog
This post should end right there, but, speaking of reading plans, listen to what I did yesterday: I found a serviceable free e-text of Moby-Dick (did you know the actual title includes the hyphen? True) on Kindle-for-the-Cloud, or whatever it's called, and also sampled more than a dozen audiobooks of Moby-Dick on iTunes. I downloaded an audiobook version narrated by a voice actor called Anthony Heald (this process took an hour and a call to Applecare tech support, and the tech support guy was flummoxed too at first, and proud of himself when he finally figured out what had gone wrong—did I mention that things go wrong?). So I've set myself up so that I can display the text of Moby-Dick writ large on my 27" screen, while at the same time listening to Anthony reading it to me. It's quite nice.

Things do go right sometimes. For example, I needed a new rug for the living room, and for half a year I had my eye on one I liked that was too expensive for me. Finally it disappeared from the website—sold out. Rats. Lost my chance.

But then I got a big idea, and did a reverse image search on the catalogue picture. I found the same rug at Overstock for almost but not quite half price! And it was the last one they had! I ordered it, feeling smug, like you feel when you score what you think is a bargain.

Trouble is, the rug they sent looked quite a bit different from the JPEG in the catalog. Not just a different color; it had different design elements, too. So after another hour or so with Customer Service, Overstock agreed to send a UPS call tag for it, pay return shipping, and give me a refund.

So far so good, right? Well, then Butters threw up on the rug. Twice.

So of course I couldn't in good conscience return it after that (even though it cleaned up nicely), so I had to call off UPS and cancel the return.

So what's good about this story? Well...the plumber liked the rug.

So there's that.

By the way, the two most famous printed editions of Moby-Dick (besides the first) are the three-volume Lakeside Press Edition of 1930, with illustrations by Rockwell Kent, limited to 1,000 copies; and the splendid Arion Press Edition of 1979, with illustrations by Barry Moser, limited to 265 copies. I believe, although I am not certain, that each is considered the masterpiece of their respective illustrators. But both are unquestionably masterpieces of bookmaking and highly prized, and command prices of many thousands of dollars when they are available at all (my ambition would be just to lay eyes on them, once). Both have been reproduced in diminished trade versions that reproduce the masterful typography and illustrations. Even the Folio Society edition with the Kent illustrations is getting up towards a grand now. At least the illustrations in both these cases actually relate to the text.

So I have plans to finish Moby-Dick in 2017. Isn't it fitting that the book about the White Whale is the metaphorical white whale of my minimalist novel-reading program? Voyaging to the bitter end with Mr. Heald in my ear is definitely one of my resolutions for the coming year.

I shall end here with that. Please check back next year at this time, to see how I did.

Mike
(Thanks for all the swell book recommendations yesterday.
You got me enthused and energized.)

P.S. By a wonderful coincidence, Nathaniel Philbrick, who wrote a popular nonfiction book about the only real-life sinking of a whale ship by a whale (it was called In the Heart of the Sea), has a sort-of new book out called Why Read Moby-Dick? Maybe my timing is okay after all.

P.P.S. Longtime readers will recall my former epic obsession with "The Great White Squirrel." (I see I've repeated myself somewhat in recent days, but oh, well.) I never did get a good photograph of the white squirrel. Wildlife photography, it turns out, is hard.

Original contents copyright 2016 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

Avast there, matey
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Geoff Wittig: "I own three books from Andrew Hoyem's Arion Press, the best being his lovely Shakespeare's Sonnets, but can only dream about his Moby-Dick. Hoyem's books over time have tended toward more modernist literature rather than hoary classics, so there'll never be anything like it again. I was fortunate enough to stumble across a copy of the limited edition University of California Press slip-cased facsimile of Hoyem's Moby-Dick at a used bookstore in Rochester. I think I paid $150 for it, which my wife thought insane. But it now goes for $1,250–$1,650, so I tried to persuade her that it was a good purchase. Her reply: 'That just proves all you book collectors are insane.'"

Mike adds: Speaking of that insanity, Geoff knows, but maybe some others do not, that Nicholas Basbanes' great classic about book collecting is called A Gentle Madness. It's a great nonfiction read if you like books, a comprehensive window into the world of rare books and collecting, which has a rich lore and a vivid history. Warmly recommended.

Here are a few photos of the UC Press facsimile Geoff mentions, probably the most desirable edition of M-D for ordinary people to aspire to, provided by Mike Plews, who also owns a copy:

Bob Keefer: "Anthony Heald is a veteran actor at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, in the small southern Oregon town of Ashland—which is kind of a world capitol for audiobook narrators, since so many very good actors live there. So no surprise you picked his version. He was, if I recall, Eliza's father a couple years ago in a great production of 'My Fair Lady.'"

Jarle Vikshåland: "Regarding Moby Dick—check out the Moby Dick Big Read—each chapter read by a diffrent person. Tilda Swindon reads Chapter One, and one of my absolute favorites—Chapter Nine,  'The Sermon,' is read by Simon Callow—it's just over 20 minutes long and has Jonah and the whale as its theme. Each chapter is illustrated by a different artist. Well worth a listen."

Mike adds: Terry Letton points out that the 21st Annual Moby-Dick Marathon is just about to get underway at the New Bedford Whaling Museum. 

Peter Conway: "I sympathize with you. My four-month-old Sony alarm clock went off, as requested, at 7 a.m. this morning. I hit the snooze button, as usual, but the alarm didn't snooze. Tried again, with no luck. I hit the button to turn off the alarm, but it kept going. I unplugged it from the wall, but—wait for it—it kept going, thanks to battery backup. Flipped it over to remove the battery, but it requires a Phillips-head screw driver to open, and I don't happen to sleep with one nearby.

"By this time the dogs were looking mighty agitated, so I stumbled down two flights of stairs to the basement, tossed the clock into a room, shut the door, and went to start my day. On the one hand, the alarm certainly did its job—I was WIDE awake—but the user experience left a lot to be desired."

Alan Farthing: "Mike I said, in response to another article, that I hike several days a week. Today was meant to be one such day. However I shall be 'enjoying' the day repairing our washing machine instead. So yes I really do feel your pain!"

Thomas Paul McCann (partial comment): "Re planned obsolescence, I seem to recall Ralph Nader in Unsafe at Any Speed saying that General Motors calculated that the average mileage of their new cars before replacement was in the region of 30,000 miles. Not giving a fig about the secondhand buyer, they downgraded certain parts that were lasting way beyond 30,000 miles to save money."

Mike replies: I understand the principle, but what's the benefit to washing machine manufacturers of having the machines break down right at the holidays? Alan and I have better things to do, like hiking and reading Heart of Darkness.

(Just kidding.)

I remember reading in the '70s or '80s that Porsche developed a prototype of a "20-year car"—an automobile designed from the start for a 20-year service life. All the parts were overbuilt and understressed, all the known problem spots addressed. The bean counters, of course, killed it. The problem was that it would have had incrementally less performance and incrementally more cost (I think something like 20% or 30% in both cases) and the marketers determined that people wouldn't pay for mere longevity if it came with those penalties.

On the other hand, years ago I knew a guy who had a Honda Prelude with 420,000 miles on it. When his car payments ended, he determined to take an amount equaling one-third of his former payments and to devote that amount to annual maintenance—telling the mechanics to do whatever needed doing and replace whatever needed replacing. The car looked quite shabby, but he said he still liked it and it still drove fine. He told me something like, "Now I have to keep it, because I have to find out how much longer I can keep it going."

The opposite of planned obsolescence (one of the few words I have trouble spelling, by the bye, another being "ophthalmology") is the story of M. Allen Swift, who was given a Springfield Rolls-Royce Piccadilly P1 Roadster by his father in 1928 as a graduation present, and drove it until his death at age 102, putting 170,000 miles on it. It's instructive that these days, the value of "luxury" cars tends to plummet quickly, because excessive ongoing maintenance costs overpower their utility as cars quite quickly—in other words, there's lots to go wrong and what does go wrong is dreadfully expensive to fix. These are truly cars built for their first owners only—and thus flagrantly wasteful in a number of ways. At his death Mr. Smith bequeathed $1 million and his Rolls to the Springfield Museums, AKA the Quadrangle, in Springfield, Massachusetts, where I'm told the car is on display today.

Chas: "I hope that this note doesn't count as hubris and bring down the wrath of the gods on my washer and dryer, but as I sit here in my library I can hear, in a distant part of the house, the sound of my 1976 Maytag washer working on part of this week's laundry. The washer and dryer were bought forty years and three months ago. They have both needed some service in that time, but nothing that couldn't be done with a screwdriver and a wrench. Original cost $1,025, cost for parts over the forty years about $300.

"I have a generally low opinion of extended warranties, but if your $49 per month had started in '76 the total cost would have been $24,000. Even if it had been half that it would be far beyond exorbitant. I am not looking forward to the day when our units fail and we have to join the current repair/replace cycle. Happy New Year!"

Mike replies: That's what gets me. I left one of those '70s Maytags, still working fine, in my first Wisconsin house. Somebody should build a replica! This was a solved problem. We had this problem solved with those Maytags and their ilk. We made it into a problem again so that more people could harvest more money off us. Bah.

Happy New Year to you too.

Shootout!

Two shootouts.

First, ArsTechnica has posted a shootout between a $900 smartphone (the Apple iPhone 7—they explain why they chose it) and the $3,200 Sony A7s. The iPhone didn't do badly at all, all things considered.

As an aside, I feel a reflexive urge to defend "real" cameras against the incursion of the Barbarian hordes a.k.a. phone cameras, but I don't actually know why. I'm interested in photographs mainly. I have a gadgeteer's love of cameras and lenses that's nearly life-long and a strong sympathy with people making or attempting serious work in photography, but that doesn't by itself argue against phone cameras. Phone cameras are making photography accessible to more people, they're getting people interested in photography, people are doing great work with them that otherwise wouldn't be done, and wot the heck, I like the poxy things myself—my plan allows me to buy a new phone in 2017 and I'll probably get an iPhone 7+ just for the camera. (Assuming I can afford it, which is not an automatic assumption.) And one of the best photographs I took in 2016 was an iPhone snap.

I guess the only thing I don't like about phone cameras is what they threaten for the future of bigger, more versatile cameras—that is, they might put economic pressure on cameramakers that might stunt or even stop the development of dedicated interchangeable-lens digital cameras and systems. But that hasn't gotten critical yet, and it might never. After all, you can still buy large-format film view cameras new.

Here's the ArsTechnica phone/full-frame comparo.

B&W vs. color!
Second, for an even more critical battle, which is better, black-and-white or color? (I like this.)

Mike
(Thanks to John Hogg and Patrick Perez)

Original contents copyright 2016 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

Which to choose...
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Wolfgang Lonien: "Laughing out loud for that latter shootout—epic!"

Kent: "I'd like to know how many people buy iPhones, or whatever, primarily for the camera, and then exclaim, 'And it has a built-in phone too! That could come in handy!' Until the camera becomes the main purchase motivation I just can't get comfortable with that 'most popular camera in the world' shtick. Most pervasive, maybe, but that doesn't necessarily equal 'most popular.' I can take photos with my phone, to be sure. I can do digital zoom. Sometimes I can even take pretty decent photos. But with my camera I can focus manually or shift autofocus points as required, adjust aperture and shutter speed on the fly, apply exposure compensation, and even change lenses for a whole new perspective! And in modern electronic viewfinders I get to see what all those settings are doing in real time. There's more, and although I understand that a lot of people couldn't and in fact don't need to be bothered with the details, to me the details are what makes it 'photography' (drawing or painting with light)."

Alan Carmody: "A smartphone like the iPhone 7 is a better camera in low light than film cameras ever were. A smartphone like the iPhone 7 has a better, sharper lens than most 35mm consumer film cameras (such as a Retinette or Instamatic) ever had, for decades."

John Nollendorfs: "Phone cameras is where the new interesting imager research is going on, like backside illuminated sensors, computational imaging and the like. What's really amazing about the new phone cameras, is they just work, no matter who pushes the button. Just need to know how to point it. They deliver amazing images under conditions we never thought possible. These new phones are like a Swiss army knife—phone, camera, video camera, music, games, email, internet, calendar...I'm a latecomer, getting my first 'smart phone' a little over a year ago (MotoX Pure). The 21 MP Sony sensor in this phone really delivers under decent light levels. I made some 18x24" prints that totally rival same size prints from my Nikon D800E. In fact I recently had a show with prints from both cameras on display. No one could tell which images were shot with the phone and which with the Nikon. No, it doesn't replace the Nikon, but I do have the phone with me most of the time."

John Camp: "I'm really tired of these lame Ars camera comparisons. It's like comparing a Porsche 911 to a Prius and scoring the Prius as the winner because it gets better mileage and will reach the speed limit, and who would ever want to drive faster than that or use up more gasoline than they absolutely have to? I use an iPhone camera from time to time, usually for note-taking, and yesterday as a rubbernecker looking at an automobile accident (I was stopped at a traffic signal at the time) but I'd never use it for anything I thought of as serious photography. iPhones, in my opinion, don't take photos as good as those taken by film point-and-shoots in 1980, and in 1980, we still used Nikons, Canons, etc. Why? Because we wanted to take decent photographs. The same still applies."

psu: "I see the phone camera as a reasonable replacement for the relatively casual single (wide-ish) lens camera of yore. The last gen or two of the iPhone camera are certainly up to what 35mm point-and-shoot cameras could do. Probably better along many axes. This turns out to be what most people want out of a camera. And the fact that it's inside your pocket-sized internet-connected computer is just another bonus.

"The future will probably bring even more capability in the phones while the current traditional camera companies show no signs of understanding how cameras can work in the more modern context. The "'traditional' camera companies have had their lunch eaten because they have been building machines for a 2001 workflow that emulated the same basic workflow for 35mm film that has existed for 60 or 70 years before 2001. Meanwhile, what people want is a more seamless way to move from shooting to editing to sharing, which CanNikOlyFujiSony basically understand nothing about.

"I still shoot with a 'real' camera when the phone won't do the job. But I hate that it takes 10x longer to edit and process the image after the fact."

Open Mike II: The 2017 Novel (OT)

I mentioned science fiction in the P.S. of the previous post, which brings me along to a New Year's topic.

I've been racking my brain, but I believe I have read only one or only three science fiction books in my entire life. It was a thing called The Foundation Trilogy and I read it when I was 13. I read an omnibus version in one volume (like this one) but it was originally three novels, which is why the number confusion.

Somehow, all of these images came up in an image search for "Isaac Asimov." From left to right, Arthur C. Clarke, Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo, Frankenstein's monster, Hana Rahil Berman, Borges, Poe, the Duke of Windsor, Harold Pinter, an etching of Fermat, and a pencil drawing of Carlos Santana. Don't ask me.

The author, Isaac Asimov, was quite famous at the time (1970), and might still be. I had read an admiring interview of him and wanted to read one of his books. (The thing I remember about the interview now is that Prof. Asimov, who was very prolific, had six IBM Selectric electric typewriters, and when one of them broke and had to go in for repair, he fretted about it until it came back.) I remember enjoying The Foundation Trilogy a lot; I have good memories of the experience, and a high opinion of the book(s), and I'm glad I read it(them); and although I remember what the volume looked like and the picture on its cover and where I was when I finished it and all my impressions about it at the time, I do not recall a thing about the plot or action. And, after reading it, without conscious intention at the time, I set science fiction aside, without prejudice. I bear the genre no ill-will and no disrespect whatsoever. It just didn't seem like my cup of tea. Tea is not my cup of tea either, come to that. I say that also with no animus at all. One can't like everything.

Or at least, one doesn't.

New Year's 2017
2016 was a terrible year for me. I'm glad it's ending. My annus horribilis, with apologies to Her Majesty. It marks the start of my old age I'm sure, emotionally, if not technically.

(Technically old age begins at 65, according to the DSM IV. I'm 59 for a few more months yet.)

For one thing, I like to read, but I read only 30 or so books in 2016, my lowest total in a long time. And because I read mostly nonfiction, my tradition is to read at least one famous or celebrated novel every year, and this past year I read no novels at all. Not even that ceremonial single one.

This seems a mistake. I like nonfiction, but it needs a little leavening.

But 2016 is over now, and I mean to move on. I intend to think positively, keep moving forward, hold my head up, and meet the future with fortitude and resilience. With cheer, even. For one thing, I have a whole list of resolutions this year, and some of them I am damn well going to damn well keep [sic].

...Beginning with that novel. I'm not going to let 2017 go by without observing my old tradition.

Past "annual novels" have included Jane Eyre (loved it), Treasure Island (surprisingly thin, I thought, although perhaps I was just out of sync with it), In Cold Blood, David Copperfield, and Native Son (excellent, retaining its power to shock). I attempted Moby Dick one year but foundered on its rocky shoals. I tend to like to "read around" the book I choose, too—reading criticism, ancillary works, and watching film adaptations if there are any (I watched three film versions of Jane Eyre). My question is, any suggestions? Perhaps something fat and grand and a page-turner. And nothing that will be too hard on me.

Nothing by Kafka(!).

Mike

There is usually only one "Open Mike," but I didn't want to let that grammar post just hang there.

Original contents copyright 2016 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

A good year
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John Camp: "Shame! Good nonfiction gives you only facts, which you already probably have enough of, while good novels attempt to get at truth, which nobody ever has enough of. Maybe you should assign one of your minions to search the Internet for a credible list of the 100 greatest novels of all time, and TOP could sponsor a great novels club, read one novel at a time. We'd have all 100 read in eight years or so. Persistence is your friend in almost everything (except murder, burglary, etc.) and the reading of great novels would not be an exception."

Nigel: "Dickens...Bleak House. Fat and grand, and a page turner (for me, at least). Your difficulties with Moby Dick and science fiction reminded me of this wonderful interview with Ray Bradbury."

Mike replies: That is wonderful. I always liked Ray Bradbury, because of Dandelion Wine. And come to think of it I did read Fahrenheit 451, which I'm pretty sure counts as science fiction—raising my lifetime total.

Rip Smith: "Go back and read The Foundation Trilogy again. I read it when I was in high school and then again some time after I passed the 59-year-old mark. It was even better the second time around."

MarkR: "Books? If you need your literature fix just put some Dylan on the turntable."

Mike replies: Oh dear. As Ctein used to say, put down that can opener and step away from the can of worms....

RubyT: "Since I don't see it mentioned here, I'd like to put in a good word for Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset, in the Tiina Nunnally translation. I did not discover it until about 10 years ago—it's actually a trilogy and won the Nobel Prize in literature. It gives such a vivid picture of life in 14th-century Norway and mixes the small details with the great questions of life in a delightful manner. Even though it is long, I am planning to read it for a third time in the coming year.

"In my youth I probably read 300 books a year, and even now I try to read at least 50, so I do not call this my favorite book lightly."

Mike replies: Thanks. I just downloaded that.

Yvonne: "Michel Houellebecq is the one of the most interesting authors I've read of late.

"I didn't think I would like him (especially because of the crass way he writes about sex and women), but about a year and half ago, I read all of his books in a very short time. I got kind of obsessed.

"If you like your authors politically correct, stay away, but if you enjoy subversion and satire, which can be laugh-out-loud funny, you will have come to the right place.

"The central theme is his work is the decline of western civilization, and while his characters revel in hedonism and sex (if they can get it—the sexually frustrated male is a common character) they find little joy or satisfaction there, but they know they can't go back to traditional values, which are finished for any number of logical reasons.

"Perhaps the best book to start with is Map and Territory. The protagonist is French photographic artist, who becomes a commercial success creating works based on Michelin tourist maps. It was the first one I read.

"The Possibility of an Island is a sort of Si-Fi look at the human predicament—a Scientology-like cult finds a way out of the dictates of normal biology and creates a race of pseudo-people. I really enjoyed it, even though I'm not normally into Sci-Fi.

"I read Submission (France elects a Muslim president in the 2020s), and I'm looking forward to whatever he does next.

"And Whatever is his first book, which is also very funny, but veers off into craziness at the end. However, his descriptions of the modern day work-place make for great satire rooted the mundane lives of a couple of IT drudges who work for the French Ministry of Agriculture.

What I think, fundamentally, is that you can’t do anything about major societal changes. It may be regrettable that the family unit is disappearing. You could argue that it increases human suffering. But regrettable or not, there’s nothing we can do. That’s the difference between me and a reactionary. I don’t have any interest in turning back the clock because I don’t believe it can be done. You can only observe and describe. I’ve always liked Balzac’s very insulting statement that the only purpose of the novel is to show the disasters produced by the changing of values. He’s exaggerating in an amusing way. But that’s what I do: I show the disasters produced by the liberalization of values.

"This quote from Houellebecq goes some way toward summing up the general themes of his work."

Wednesday Open Mike: What Is a Split Infinitive? (OT)

All you have to remember is: Trekkies know.

A verb is an action word—basically anything you can do (although there are a few refinements of that—but let's move on). The basic test of whether a word is a verb is to see if the word "to" goes in front of it. To run, to hide. The infinitive is just a fancy word for the plain unadorned form of the verb, "without an inflection binding it to a particular subject or tense."

To be or not to be, that is the infinitive.

(At least until you consider what bindings of inflection Prince Hamlet is eliding when he identifies that as the question.)

"Splitting" it just involves sticking an extra modifier in the middle of the infinitive phrase:

To boldly go....

There's nothing wrong with splitting infinitives, with the possible exception that it might give poo-head grammar-police types an opening to criticize you. But never mind them. It's just another tool in the toolkit. They, not thee thou, are the know-nothings; even writers who rail against splitting infinitives sometimes split their infinitives, and no one cares. 'Tis a mark neither of bad writing nor ignorance.

Boldly go as your ear for cadence bids.

Mike

"Open Mike" is the off-topic editorial page of TOP. It appears like clockwork on Wednesdays, never fails.

P.S. I think it's Trekkies. I always get Star Wars and Star Trek confused. Which one had the princess who just died? Which one had the guys who made the worst album ever recorded? I can never keep 'em straight. All I know for sure is that one of them had a robot named Artoo Threepio who said "Danger, Will Robinson." Have I got it right about which ones boldly went? (I know what you're saying..."And you want to be my latex salesman.")

Mike

Original contents copyright 2016 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

Boldly pitch in
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2016's Best Deals

All year long, our sponsor / patron / advertiser B&H Photo has been having daily "Deal Zone" deals. For today only two days only, B&H is reprising all of 2016's best deals. (There are lots.)

Check 'em out.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2016 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

Deal with it.
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chris_scl: "Small correction—this seems to be a two-day event. Deals expire [at the end of] Dec. 28th."

Mike replies: Thanks Chris.

The Smartest Way to Buy a Camera

Hearken ye! I'd like to blather just a bit about a very old word, yeoman.

But first: I'm being kind of a stumblebum this year. A sluggard. What used to be called, back in the dim, swiftly receding days of the 'nineties, a slacker. I posted Part I of the "Recommended Cameras" list way back on December 6th, and haven't even gotten around to writing Part II yet. (This isn't that.)

I hate it when I do things like that. I think at some point during my fifties, my get up and go got up and went.

I'll work on that soon. (The list, I mean, not my gumption, moxie, work ethic, spirit of enterprise, etc.—my current activity level is age-appropriate. As the great Uncle Arthur Kramer used to say, I'd work harder, but it would interfere with my nap.)

Meantime, it struck me that like many reviewers, I naturally concentrate on talking about high-level cameras in every line. The ones that offer the highest performance and the most appealing "it" factor. Before it arrived, I assumed I would include the new Olympus E-M1 Mark II on the TOP list.

But when it arrived on the scene, I was taken aback by the price. Two thousand dollars. For a Micro 4/3 body? You can get a Panasonic GX8 for $800 less even when it's not on sale. Same for Olympus's own Pen-F. You can get a full-frame Sony A7 Mark II mirrorless for $500 less.

So is that...smart?

Granted, it's an "overdeveloped" camera, as Olympus told DPReview. Granted, it's targeted at pros, who might like a striver's level of snappy performance and to whom a few hundred dollars tacked onto the purchase price might not matter in the grand scheme of the financial statement. Granted, its level of performance is class-leading in many ways. And it's well designed and pleasant to use, despite having its On/Off switch in an annoying place. I liked the Mark I, which I owned briefly. (And which is still available. For a nice price. You can get it in a kit bundled with the $700 12–40mm ƒ/2.8 zoom for $1,300—$700 less than the Mark II body with no lens.)

But...two grand. It made me think twice, and then think again. Is the E-M1 Mark II truly recommendable at that exalted price?

I know people who will buy it, many of them gladly. But what about people for whom the value equation is important? That includes a lot of us. It even includes a lot of people who could afford an E-M1 Mark II if they wanted to.

The E-M1 Mark II's stabilization may be the best of any camera's.

It's so, so tempting to chase the latest and best. Top models of anything are "no apologies." (Well, at least for three or four years, until they get superseded.)

But it might be smartest, just in terms of spending your money intelligently, to pick the lineup you like the best and then buy the next best camera, whatever that is. Thus:

• E-M5 Mark II rather than E-M1 Mark II.
• D7200 rather than D500.
• A6300 rather than A6500.
• 6D rather than 5D Mark IV.
• X-T10 rather than X-T2.
• A7II rather than A7rII.

Or even...

• E-M10 Mark II rather than E-M5 Mark II!

And so on. You get the idea.

The strategy might not be sexy, but it's sound.

Medieval metaphor
And now for "yeoman," and you can stop reading right here unless you enjoy reading my nonsense.

Yeoman is a tough word to get a handle on—it means many things, and none of them seem to quite relate to each other. A class in England below the gentry. (Not very helpful, given that most of us are hazy about what "gentry" means, too.) A clerk in the Navy. The owner of a small farm (we have lots of yeomen around where I live, if that's the case. Or can you be both Amish and a yeoman?). In medieval times, a servant ranking higher than a page but not quite as high as a squire. Without getting into a tangle of etymology, competing meanings, and mildly conflicting mental images, I think basically yeoman means one who serves, but solidly; a stalwart; someone who is loyal, dependable, and responsible. Someone who does drudge work because it needs to be done, but works well.

Anyway I think one might call these second-tier, near-top-of-the-line, more value-oriented, second-rank cameras yeoman cameras.

Okay, that name won't catch on. I'm not good at naming things. But you get the idea. From these yeoman cameras you get 80% of the performance of the glamorpuss line-leader cameras, but for more reasonable prices. They're reliable. Sensible.

The smart buy.

The GX85 instead of the GX8. Anybody use the X-T10? Are ya happy enough?

...Because sometimes, you'd like the top of the line, but you just don't feel like parting with two grand for an electronic device that's going to be yesterday's news three to five years from now.

Nothing against the noble Olympus E-M1 Mark II.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2016 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

Yo, man!
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Luca: "Cameras are now computers, and with computers the smart strategy has always been exactly the one you just described, i.e. buying the 'second best.' And frankly unless you're a sport / war / extreme situations in general shooter I don't see the point to have an ultrafast camera (and even then something like the A6500 or the A77 II could be all you need anyway). Essentially, maybe 0.1% of us 'need' (as opposed to 'want') an EOS 1Dx, a Nikon D5 or even an Olympus E-M1 Mark II.

"And the X-T10, by the way, is an awesome camera!"

Marcelo Guarini: "I was waiting for the OM1 Mk II, but after reading its specifications I realized is not my camera. I don't need a camera for fast action, sealed for Mars sandstorms and freeze-proof for the dark side of the Moon. Amazon had the Pen F for $945 during a couple of days in November, so I got one and I couldn't be happier. Image quality is better than my OM-1 and so is the in-camera stabilizer. Last night I took several perfectly sharp handheld half-second shots. I'm loving this little camera."

Gordon Lewis: "Whether it was wise for Olympus to price the E-M1 Mark II at $2,000 and whether it's wise for someone to pay it are two different issues. The issue is moot for me because I can't justifying paying that much for any camera. I'm doing what you suggest in your post: looking at cameras that do most if not all of what I need a camera to do, at a lower price than the top of the line. Instead, I'll use the money I save to spend on high-quality lenses. As you say, cameras come and go, but good lenses are good for a lifetime."

Mike replies: I agree with you entirely except for the very last word of your comment. Seems to me the only lens line I could have used for my lifetime—mine being similar in span and era to yours—is the Leica M line. And with that there are, and have been, many other compromises. Seems to me when you and I were young we could have invested in the Canon FD lens line, and, while those are newly "good" again—on a full-frame mirrorless digital camera—there have been significant stretches of our lifetimes during which they would not have been good.

But if you had said "for a longer time" or even "for a long time" instead of "for a lifetime," then we would agree.

Dennis (partial comment): "I've noticed many times that I tend to be happier with things that I've paid more than I've wanted for than I am with things where I've compromised out of frugality. I love a good 'price performer' but over time, I have far more regrets about bargains than I do luxuries. So my recommendation is don't buy based on perceived value nor just because something is state of the art—buy what you want."

beuler: "It seems to me that Olympus is putting the E-M1 Mark II up against the Canikon 1D X Mark II / D5. Brave but stupid? Let's wait and see. In any case it is the cheapest of the three."

Arg: "One only needs to read the featured comments by Dennis and Gordon to confirm that the real driver here is one's personal values. By which I don't mean anything unique, but rather the common value sets. For example, valuing exclusivity highly is a common set, as is valuing economy."

This Day Called Christmas

And so this is Christmas! Merry Christmas and goodwill to all.

Christmas is certainly our most interesting holiday. It's a fascinating mixture of pre-Christian, religious, and secular elements...and the secular elements are both folklorish and commercial. Yet none of these elements, somehow, manage to diminish the others.

The holiday is more ancient than Jesus, harking back past the Saturnalia of the Romans to various ancient Midwinter folk festivals among the pagans, perhaps all the way back to solstice worship at the dawn of recorded history. The solstice would have been noticed earliest by Northern peoples, who would have been most aware of the lengthening of the night and grateful for the season when the long nights began to recede again.

The Christian church—perhaps originally to co-opt a persistent celebration it couldn't eradicate—consecrated today as the birthday of Jesus. The nativity of Jesus is a story full of mystery and beauty that counterbalances the dramatic story of his betrayal and death. It's a foundation-stone of the now-ancient New Testament, appearing in two of the four gospels, Luke and Matthew. It bears a strong resemblance to earlier mythical origin stories, especially the birth of Mithras, a mythical god who anchored a populist folk religion in Roman times; the nativity story's infolding of myth and legend infuse it with power and piteousness. The exquisite loveliness of its symbolism is celebrated with nativity scenes large and small across the Christian world. Together, the stories of the birth and death of Jesus sum up, for many Christians, the beauty and drama, the tragedy and hopefulness of their own lives and the lives of those they love.

Christmas is also secular. It drives revelers to an orgy, sometimes literally a frenzy, of shopping and acquisitiveness. As a secular event it's so broadly a part of our culture that it's celebrated by many non-Christians too. Even many Christians seem most comfortable with the secular nature of Christmas: traditionally it was a hallmark of the "lazy Christian" to go to church only on Christmas or Easter, but many Christmas-loving Christians forego even that observance.

Christmas can seem overpoweringly commercial if you're not careful—the economic fortunes of retailers and the changing annual fashions among shoppers are news every year, and Christmas marketing saturates us. But many of the holiday's most beloved elements continue to have a strong folklorish character. The Christmas tree and boughs of holly, Sinterklaas or Old Saint Nick, spiked eggnog and mistletoe, stockings hung at the mantel, the many beloved poems, tales, movies and songs—and many ethnic variations on those and many other elements, even practices and traditions specific to particular families—all combine to create a mood of midwinter magic that for many people embody the best aspects of family life, of childhood and the nostalgia for childhood.

It might seem that these folk elements must be ancient, but many of them are relatively recent: I love it that Washington Irving, the author of Rip Van Winkle, invented the idea of Santa's flying reindeer like Edward Hibberd Johnson invented electric Christmas-tree lights. Like a great many of our favorite folkloric Christmas notions, both of those date from the 19th century. A few even come from the 20th. Christmas is capacious and welcoming that way—the melting-pot of holidays, you might say. In America, even football has been allowed into the overflowing horn-o'-plenty of the day's traditions.

So Christmas is simultaneously a mysterious and very ancient holiday and a crassly modern one, a folk festival as well as a religious holy day.

It's wise to remember that not every Christmas is a happy one in every life. In the traditional Polish vigil dinner of Wigilia, on Christmas Eve, it's customary to set an extra place at the table of the feast for the wayward traveler who might knock at the door. Thus is symbolized a welcoming spirit for the "odd man out." The itinerant traveler, after all, might once have been the Nazarene carpenter Himself, out wandering from hamlet to hamlet spreading His news; who knows? Have a thought for the lonely today, whose loneliness might be accentuated in this season; don't be miserly with acts of kindness that might make a difference to another.

For underlying this great merry amalgam of a holiday like a soft warm bed is the shared sense that this day called Christmas is a day to get in better touch with our better natures. It's a day to set differences aside, to be a good neighbor to our neighbors, to remember our children and to delight them, to attend church, to raise our voices in song or listen to others sing, to say a kind word, to reaffirm family ties and call to mind old friendships and dear loved ones departed; to raise a glass and eat well and help others eat well. It invites us to feel without stinting the goodwill and the compassion for others that the story of God and the sojourn of His Christ-child on Earth has kindled in so many hearts over so many centuries. It's a day to lift our moods and our spirits, whether individually or together, however we might find ourselves on this day, on our own sojourns here, in this season of this year.

A Merry Christmas to you.

Mike Johnston
Penn Yan, New York
Christmas Day 2016

Copyright 2016 by Michael C. Johnston. All Rights Reserved.

Please don't take my work, but I don't mind if you point others to it!
Here's a quick link to this page: http://tinyurl.com/h9bcjpa

The illustrations are public-domain images from Karen at thegraphicsfairy.com.

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Henry Richardson: "Merry Christmas! I read this interesting article concerning Christmas yesterday: 'The Geopolitics of Christmas.'"

Mike replies: That is interesting, Henry, thanks. An ambitious article, too. I didn't realize that the "decorated pine tree" was a 19th century custom, or that the phrase "Merry Christmas" itself became the standard Christmas greeting due to Dickens' A Christmas Carol in 1843. 

Speaking of which, did you know that Dickens originally set out to write a new Christmas novella every year? He wrote five of them, of which A Christmas Carol is the first. None achieved nearly the acclaim or popularity of the first (or were as good), so he eventually gave up the project.

Fruits of the Season

First, Happy Hanukkah! To all our Jewish readers. Today is the 25th day of Kislev in the Hebrew calendar, when Jewish people celebrate the re-dedication of the Holy Second Temple of Jerusalem during the time of the Maccabees. It's also known as the Festival of Lights, and one of its many traditions is the lighting of the Menorah, a special nine-branched candelabra. The candles are lit in succession on each of the eight nights of Hanukkah. The Menorah is one of the most widely recognized—and loveliest—symbols of Jewish ceremonial art. Of course it's also the 24th of December in the Gregorian calendar, the day before the feast of Christmas.

I've received many nice calendars, cards, and self-published books from TOP readers this holiday season, as I do every year, and I just wanted to say a big "thanks!" to everyone for sending those along. It's a pleasure to see peoples' work and I appreciate all the good wishes.

One of the things I receive is the Annual from Joseph O. Holmes. There are only 100 copies this year, but in the future I'd like to see if I can possibly help make Joe's Annual accessible in a limited way to TOP readers who might want to see it. Joe works on it "in his head" all year, and does such a nice job. There are others whose work I greatly enjoy seeing too, of course; I don't want to seem to play favorites.

Rob Strong, who I wrote about in the previous post, had another nice idea for self-publishing work—a set of postcards. These could be sold as a set, used for self-promotion, or simply sent as personalized message postcards or as individual promotional mailers. If well calculated, this is a versatile idea.

Oh, but now I'm shading into discussing mammon, and that will never do, on this first day of Hanukkah and the day of Christmas Eve.

Best wishes, good health and good cheer, and happy holidays to all!

Mike

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Client ≠ Subject

Photographer Rob Strong (of the School Street School School of School Photography*) came by for breakfast the other day, on his way through the area on a Christmas journey. He said something very interesting. Something I don't think I've ever heard before quite the way he put it.

It sounded like things are going well for him and his business. Here's his current website; it's about to be replaced by a new one. Naturally he has a lot of work to sort through in deciding what to present on the new site. We were talking about how you should put in your portfolio or on your website the kind of work you want, not necessarily the kind you've done. You want to encourage clients to think of you for the kind of work you'd like to do more of in the future.

Rob said it wasn't so simple in some ways. For example, he does about five weddings a year and really enjoys doing those, but doesn't want to do a whole lot more than that.

The thing he most wants to do more of in the future? Editorial portraits.

For those who don't know exactly what that means, it's when a client assigns you, and pays you, to go take a portrait of somebody else. Usually it's for some sort of media—newspapers, magazines, or for a book jacket or website or perhaps an annual report or institutional publication—hence the name. (Rob does a lot of work for the Tuck School and the Hopkins Center at Dartmouth College.)

Talking about editorial portraits, what Rob said was, "I've noticed I enjoy portraiture more when the client and the subject aren't the same person."

I've never heard it put quite like that, but yeah. I used to do portraits in Washington D.C., but my clients were often the subjects—or closely related to them. It removes a certain amount of control from the photographer, and dictates, to varying (and unpredictable!) degrees how you have to work and the kind of results you have to create. Rob's right—when the subject is paying you, then the subject is your boss. The work will go better if you're the boss on the set or at the location.

Speaking of portraits, I remembered to have Rob sign the mighty TOP Guest Book but for some unaccountable reason it didn't occur to me to make a quick portrait of him, which I usually do when guests visit TOP. My apologies, to he and thee.

(I know that last phrase is not grammatical, but it rhymes, and that wins.)

Mike

*The first time we met he described settling into his new studio in Lebanon, New Hampshire, which is located in a former school. The presence of the school caused the street it's on to be called School Street, and the influence then turned around the other way and caused the school to be known as the School Street School, because, of course, it was the school that was on School Street. Rob then realized that if he gave some photography classes at his studio he could call it the School Street School School of Photography, at which point he realized that to complete the name he would naturally have to include school photography in the curriculum; hence the name. There is, however, no actual School of School Photography in the School Street School.

Original contents copyright 2016 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

You're the boss
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Weather Notes

The shortest day of the year passed a couple of days ago. Hope those of you who celebrate the Solstice had a nice day! Christmas is in two days and Hanukkah starts tomorrow, and I send good wishes to all of you who will celebrate either of those holidays, too. Or any other variation—religious, ironic, personal, or "other."

Remembering too all of those in our audience and elsewhere who are alone and isolated or for whom any of these holidays is just another day. If it's just another day then it's just another day—you'll get through it.

A day of importance for me passed on Dec. 8th—that was the day of all the days in the year when sunset came earliest here where I live. The time of sunset seems to influence my perception of the length of the day more than the actual length of the day, because I don't get up before dawn's first light very often. The later the sun sets the more I like it. The older I get the more I like the longer days and the light of the sun. By the 21st, the sun was setting a full four minutes later here than it did on the 8th.

From now on the sunset gets later and later until June. And that's good.

Good light to you,
Mike

Original contents copyright 2016 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

Go lightly,
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Music Notes

KK of C60Crew has ventured a danceable mix! "Send in the Clouds." Strains of the '60s, in music and mood.

'Tis the season.

Mike
(Thanks to KK)

Original contents copyright 2016 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

Slightly off the beat,
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The Canon EOS M5 Is Shipping

Look what just arrived, barely in time for Christmas.

You might recall my reaction to the announcement of this was a bit on the skeptical side. But I can see the appeal. For example, here's one formidably nice feature that stands a good chance of converting certain buyers all by itself:

•It's a Canon

...Among other desirable features.

Merry Merry and Happy Happy, Canonistas!

Mike

Original contents copyright 2016 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

Shoot with a Canon
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Gordon Lewis: "I've actually had the pleasure of shooting with a pre-production sample of this camera for a few days. It was the first M-series Canon I had ever used, my expectations were in check, and because it was a loaner I didn't have to write a check for it. As a result, I was pleasantly surprised by how well it handled, how fast the AF was, and how good the results were. The main problem Canon has with this camera, in my opinion, is that as good as it is, there are so many other cameras that are at least as good or considerably better, for a lot less money, and with a lot more lenses available. Yes, I know Canon offers an M-to-EF lens adapter, but most EF lenses are huge compared to the M5. Just because you can do it doesn't make it a good or practical idea.

"So far, the best I can say about it is that it beats any mirrorless interchangeable lens camera Nikon has to offer."

Do Reviews Really Review? And Other Matters of Contention

It's been a busy few days here at TOP Rural HQ. (I no longer refer to it as "World" headquarters; we have given up our former ambitions of world conquest. Too much competition.) Note to other one-man-band one-person-band bloggers: never write even glancingly about religion unless you welcome extra work.

More reading about grammar, oh joy
...And that applies to "religious" topics outside of religion, too. I'm always pleased to have a real expert in my corner, taking my side in an argument I have put forth that I have neither the wit nor the knowledge to support on my own. In the case of my incendiary comments about the beloved and avuncular Strunk & White the other day, the cavalry comes to the (well, to my) rescue in the person of one Geoffrey K. Pullum, an actual real-life grammarian and a Professor of General Linguistics in the School of Philosophy, Psychology, and Language Sciences at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland (although I believe he is American—apparently he lived here for many years, at least). (MarkR first pointed me to him.)

He has written several times about "Strunk & White" (The Elements of Style). The article slanted more toward a popular audience is rather provokingly called "50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice" and appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education in 2009 (thanks to KeithB for this). The professor is not critical of Prof. Strunk and Mr. White themselves: "I'm not nitpicking the authors' writing style. White, in particular, often wrote beautifully, and his old professor would have been proud of him." Regarding their grammar advice, however, the good professor's gloves come off: "The book's toxic mix of purism, atavism, and personal eccentricity is not underpinned by a proper grounding in English grammar." For one thing, he (entertainingly) points out that Strunk and White frequently violate their own directives, sometimes even in the same paragraph in which they propose the rule:

"Keep related words together" is further explained in these terms: "The subject of a sentence and the principal verb should not, as a rule, be separated by a phrase or clause that can be transferred to the beginning." That is a negative passive, containing an adjective, with the subject separated from the principal verb by a phrase ("as a rule") that could easily have been transferred to the beginning.

In one sentence, in other words, Strunk and White violate fully four of their own principles, including the very one they are setting forth. He gives more such examples.

The Grammarian: Geoff Pullum. Photo by Timo Klein.

The more scholarly article appears in the journal English Today and is titled "The Land of the Free and The Elements of Style." It appeared in 2010, which makes me think it might have been written because of all the flak Prof. Pullum must have gotten following the publication of the first article; although that's just a guess. He reiterates the points of the 2009 article, some in greater detail, and adds more.

He also compares Strunk & White to its Ur-text—Strunk alone, that is, pre-1959—so as to discover which prejudices and errors are White's. He discovers that because one of White's rules prohibits a construction that Strunk himself used, White went back and purged all the instances of it from his former professor's writing! And, it turns out, it is none other than Andy White who is solely responsible for the longstanding and pervasive prejudice against the poor maligned split infinitive. Say it ain't so!

The second article's conclusion, of course, is similar: "My judgment [is] that The Elements of Style is a hopeless guide to English usage and has been deleterious to grammar education in America. I do not think the issue is trivial. The Elements of Style does real and permanent harm...sensible adults are wrongly persuaded that their grasp of their native tongue is imperfect and their writing is incorrect. No good purpose is served by damaging people’s self-confidence in this way."

The allure of being learned is only for those who will learn
I have my own private guess to explain the popularity of Strunk & White. When I was in eighth grade, we had a "gentleman amateur" English teacher, a parent who taught only one or two classes (arriving from his estate in the woods north of the city in a variety of antique sports cars). He actually let our class vote on whether we wanted to learn grammar. Our vote was yes, so he started in on the subject. Five days later, we overruled ourselves and demanded a new vote, by which we overwhelmingly changed our decision to no—exclamation point elided but implied.

The lesson I took from that experience is that grammar is a wonderful thing to know but a horrible thing to learn. (I myself know almost nothing about it...but then, my entire formal education in the subject lasted five days, so what can you expect?)

Strunk & White is popular because it provides the illusion of knowledge while giving the reader permission to set the subject aside. Learn these few simple, sensible-sounding rules, it seems to say, and you will have done enough. It's a formidable promise for a book to make, and Americans have been gratefully accepting its offer for 57 years now. Because who wants to have to learn grammar?

Vids, vids, vids, vids
It hasn't escaped my notice that there are an awful lot of camera review sites now. Most recently, they all seem to be in the form of videos, some of which are very nicely made.

Video bores me generally (except YouTube videos of snooker matches, of course, which are so exciting that they keep my eyes riveted on my monitor. There's always that one vivid exception to any rule!). Generally I would much rather read a review at my own pace than be forced to sit still while a presenter plods along at his pace. How else but in written form can I consume an online review in the proper fashion, cherrypicking only the "Introduction" and the "Conclusion" and skipping over all the dreary technical bits in the middle?

It's not nice (or too smart, actually) for a reviewer to review his competition. But one thing struck me as I was watching some of these video reviews last week (I'm not saying this is true of all of them): some of them could very easily be corporate PR. It's not that they share some features of corporate PR; it's not that they present some of the information the same way; it's that they're indistinguishable from it. It's like they're interviewing for it and what we're watching is the screen test.

That's the better ones. The worse they are, the more incompetent and superficial and bumbling, the less they do resemble PR, it's true...but of course then they have those other faults.

A point of view
Back when I was an editor I had a simple rule for reviewers: don't repeat things the reader can get from the manufacturer's sales literature or from the instruction manual. It seems now that many reviews don't offer anything but. (Or maybe they're following one of the admonitions from The Elements of Style: "Do not inject opinion.")

Wouldn't it be better, now that there are so many review sites and channels, for reviewers to go the opposite way? Instead of being so careful and technical, wouldn't it be better for some of 'em to have a stronger flavor, and more opinionation as opposed to less? It would be more interesting. What they seem to lack is not just judgements of any kind but a point of view. There's nothing wrong with having a point of view. No one is under the misapprehension that we are omnipotent. The key is to be clear and forthright about your taste, your prejudices, and your own needs, and then to go ahead and write or perform the review as if you were yourself. 

If there were only a small or limited number of reviewers out there and only a few places for people to get any information at all, well then, fine—caution, evenhandedness, a conservative focus on features, and a sober piety might even be fitting. But these videos are all over the place. When I get to the third or fourth one turgidly going over the same feature yet again, one I already knew about from the B&H product page, my head starts to flop to the side and I begin to drool.

But they're all lovely and all the people who make them are above average, so please don't kill me, please. I will now stop talking about the competition again, which is my usual stance, or state.

Mike
(Thanks to KeithB and several others)

Original contents copyright 2016 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

Splitting infinitives since 2005
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Colin Work: "I'm sure there are some great review videos out there, but I seldom see them. I don't sit down of an evening to watch reviews. I have better things to do. But I do like to read reviews when I have a spare moment during a work break, on a train etc. I'll probably be using a phone or tablet, and don't like using headphones. So, sorry to all you vloggers, you may have the time to produce this stuff, but in my case, it's wasted time 'cause I don't have the time to watch it. Want my attention? Put it in writing—and make sure the first couple of paragraphs convince me that reading the rest will be worthwhile. By all means include a link to a video in your text to illustrate something or other—if your article is good, I may watch it at some point. I suspect part of the attraction of video is the lure of some revenue via YouTube advertising."

David Raboin: "Thank you for this post Mike! My 7th grade English teacher convinced me that I was a hopeless writer because I couldn't diagram a sentence. Then, after 7th grade, my school district loosened it's English curriculum and I never received another grammar lesson. While I felt lucky to avoid that dreaded subject, I also never overcame my self-consciousness about grammar. Last summer, I downloaded the $.01 Kindle version of Elements of Style to see if I could figure out grammar as an adult. Part way in I started to question myself because it seemed like Strunk and White were contradicting themselves. Certainly I must not know how to correctly identify the passive voice because I was finding it everywhere in Elements of Style. I was sure I was wrong. Now, thanks to this post, I feel vindicated. Maybe this is the confidence boost I need to get back to work on that book I'm procrastinating?"

Mike replies: You made an error in the third sentence, David—"possessive 'its' never gets an apostrophe." We just have to memorize that.

But my point is, so what if you made an error? As an online writer I have to be my own copyeditor and proofreader, and it fits my skill set because I used to be a magazine editor. (Though, I should note in passing, a magazine editor who had a copyeditor, Nancy, and a proofreader, Burt. Nancy taught me lots of tricks and things to look for, but I overruled about half of her red-penciled corrections. Many of her corrections made me laugh—she once struck out a whole paragraph written by a famous photographer and scribbled in the margin, "A complete mess—toss the whole thing.") But real writers don't even need to know how to spell. Neither Ernest Hemingway nor Jane Austen could spell. Nor could William Butler Yeats or Agatha Christie. I'm capable of writing grammatically but I never studied grammar—I picked it all up by ear, and by working out problems I encountered as I wrote. Editing poor writing can be hard work (the error in your last sentence would be a little harder to correct while preserving your word choice and voice, for example)—but good writing doesn't have to be error-free. That's what copyeditors and proofreaders are for. Write that book!

Steve Jacob (partial comment): "A film or book review would be very boring if it was factual. You can wrap all the facts into performance tables and give me a straight, down to earth, subjective opinion, as long as you can back it up with something more than 'I'm a genius so my opinion is the best.' Things like 'camera handling' and 'lens character' are totally subjective, but useful to know, as long as you also know the reviewers general preferences, and how yours compare. There is a film reviewer in the UK who I disagree with about 50% of the time, but I know exactly where we differ. Because he is 100% consistent and open about his preferences, I find his reviews exceptionally useful."

emptyspaces: "I make videos about various electronics for an online retailer, and I feel everyone's pain. We don't do reviews, they're just stand-ins for those who don't want to read the web copy on a given product. And our data shows us two things: first, products we sell that have videos attached sell at a significantly higher rate, and second, most people don't read any of the web copy.

"I started out as a copywriter. Most of the 'problems' people would write to us about were addressed in the first paragraph of web copy, or at worst in the second or third. A higher and higher percentage of people just can't be bothered to read anything at all while they're shopping. Despite that being my job, I, too prefer written articles. I only turn to video in a 'how-to' situation, generally. When I shop, I rarely if ever use video in my research."

Wednesday Open Mike: Least Heat-Moon and the Spider Woman

I'm sure that those who reverence the Ten Commandments of the Torah and the Christian Bible don't need to hear my opinions about them. For the purposes of narrative, though, I need to mention that, just for myself and my own provisional personal beliefs, I had rejected the Ten Commandments by the time I was in my 20s.

That makes it sound like I once accepted them, but I don't think I ever did. They never seemed particularly useful.

But it's not like I didn't see the usefulness of having some sort of rules to live by. I got mine, adventitiously, not from Yahweh by way of Moses, but from the Spider Woman of the Hopi Indian tribe by way of an American writer who now lives in Missouri called William Least Heat-Moon, who is part Irish and part Osage. (And who holds a degree in photojournalism, I believe.) I stumbled into him in a bookstore on Connecticut Avenue in Washington, D.C. that is no longer there, and got to talk with him a while. He was a smallish man in red suspenders whose eyes were magnified by thick spectacles and who walked with a cane. I remember the conversation being quiet but intense, and so, to be polite, I bought his book, a great bestseller called Blue Highways that has become a classic of American travel writing.

Author William Least Heat-Moon

It's not like I made a conscious decision to follow the guidance of the Hopi as presented in Blue Highways (or by William himself in his talk at the bookstore? I honestly don't remember now). It's just that, looking back at my life, I find that I have done so.

I don't know what you'd call them. Every label seems pejorative in some way. Maxim? Admonition? "Commandments" is doubtless the wrong word. "Rules"? Seems legalistic. The two pieces of advice? I don't know. "Guidelines" is most neutral and accurate, I guess, although that word has a bureaucratic flavor that doesn't harmonize well with the vision of a mystical Spider Woman who created the stars (they're dewdrops in her web, according to the creation myths of the Pueblo peoples).

Matt, in the Comments, suggests "tenet." A tenet is "a principle or belief, especially one of the main principles of a religion or philosophy." That sounds right.

Anyway, the Two Tenets of the Hopi are:

"Try to understand things"

and

"Don't go around hurting people."

That's beautiful, and more like it.

I haven't been spotless, pure or blameless in my adherence to these precepts, of course. I don't try to understand color management, for example—I prefer to throw up my hands and capitulate to superstition on that one. (Life is short; why spin your wheels?) But, it turns out, they're what I've lived by since I heard about them. They seem to cover everything, with a brevity, a pithiness, and an avoidance of needless elaboration of which William Strunk jr. might have approved.

Incidentally, the word "commandment" wasn't applied to what are now known as the Ten Commandments until the year 1560, when that word made its first appearance in the Geneva Bible. Although not nearly as famous a translation as the King James Version, which came along 51 years later, the Geneva Bible was the translation used by Shakespeare and the one brought to America by the Pilgrims.

Mike
(The photo was uncredited at The Wichita Eagle)

[Ed. Note: I could swear I've written about the "two commandments" of the Hopi before in these pages, but if I have I can't find it. Apologies if this is not the first time you've heard this from me and I'm just missing it.

"Open Mike," by the bye, is the off-topic, anything-goes editorial page of TOP that appears on Wednesdays.]

Original contents copyright 2016 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

These aren't commands, but...
Like Mike or Patronize TOP’s affiliates

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Featured Comments from:

Joseph Holmes: "I remember Blue Highways very fondly. I read it in the same couple of years that I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and the two books had a very soothing effect on that young(ish) mind, which had rejected religion but sought ethical models, especially really well-written ethical models."

Mike replies: The two books are classics of about the same level, aren't they?

Off this topic, Joe, I received your privately printed 2016 Annual and I wanted to say it's gorgeous. Last year's was great but this year's is if anything even better. The pictures and printing are excellent and the pacing and editing are adroitly, expertly done. Lovely and full of feeling and interest. Thanks very much for again including me among the lucky 100.

beuler: "I am a regular reader since the Sunday Morning Photographer on the Luminous Landscape site, and I don't recall mention of this topic. It's first time I've come across this 'Try to understand things' and 'Don't go around hurting people.' It is interesting to note that the two 'utterances' are given equal importance, whereas most religious and/or ethical systems place much more importance on the second. I like that. We have an obligation to study and know the world around us, and one corollary is that ignorance should not absolve us from our wrong actions. I agree with that."

Steve D: "I'm staring at my screen a bit slackjawed at the moment. When I was a wee lad of eight or nine my stepfather (a wonderful human who never met a stranger, and who I miss dearly) sat me down to impart some wisdom. He was a large French Canadian man with a thick accent who had traveled the world mostly for work but also a short stint in the Korean war. I admired him and his stories enormously. Looking back now I'd say it was a son's love to the point of hero worship. Anyway, I can still feel him capturing my eyes with his, holding my gaze and saying...'Son, there are only two things you need to know in life to get through it as a good and happy person. I learned this a long time ago from the Indians. They say it a lot prettier than I'm going to say it to you now but I think you'll remember it better the way I'm going to say it.' He leaned in a little and said 'never stop learning and don't be an a**hole.' He added, 'If you have to wonder if you might be acting like and a**hole then that's usually a good sign that probably are so stop whatever it is you're doing and do it different or not at all.' It got traction with me. I failed his advice often enough and the results just reinforced his words. I still forget sometimes and am still reminded.

"I honestly never imagined he was serious and that it was actually rooted in genuine Native American philosophy but I guess that was me not thinking...Lord I miss him."

Upcoming Winter Print

John Lehet by MJ

Please put aside a little of the money you get for Christmas or Hanukkah for our Winter-quarter print offer!

I've been living with all of the proof prints for six days now, and it took John (the photographer) and me four days to sift through the possibilities and make a decision—he sent many variations of several prints on many papers, which were virtually all "good but different." After considering many options, we went in the direction of simplicity and purity: we'll be offering only one image at one size on one type of paper. A rather radical choice in certain ways, as you will see.

Vermont photographer John Lehet would never say this about himself, I'm almost sure, but, knowing him, I feel comfortable saying that photographic prints in his case are just the visual manifestations of his spiritual voyage—he's a longtime Buddhist who has been deeply involved in meditation practice for many years*. Accepting his work this way opens it up for me.

John is deeply into process, which I would define as the methods used to sort, clarify, and redact one's work into final form, and we'll talk about that—John is unusually insightful on that subject. The equipment he used will be fun to discuss, too.

Although of the highest possible quality in every way, the Winter Print will not be expensive, either.

That's all I'll say for now. We will offer four single prints in 2017, all by different master printmakers—one during each of the four seasons**. As for John's photograph, we won't decide on the date of the "reveal" until after Christmas, but it will be in the first few days of January.

Mike

*When I asked him if it was okay if I said this, he said yes, but added a paragraph explaining with uncommon thoughtfulness why he doesn't care for the word "spiritual." I should see if I can get him to write a short post about meditation—that would be very interesting.

**Also, I'm discussing bargain photo book sales with other publishers, too. More fun in the New Year.

Original contents copyright 2016 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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It Was The Best of Times, or Maybe It Wasn't (OT)

Speaking of books about writing, as I was the other day....

Certain ideas are strong and clean and simple and have a powerful appeal because of it; while at the same time they have the slight disadvantage of being wrong. The most popular writer's guidebook book in America has long been The Elements of Style, more often called "Strunk and White" after William Strunk jr., the book's professor author, and E.B. White, Strunk's former and most famous student and the book's original reviser.

The problem with Strunk and White is that, despite being strong and clean and simple, it's often wrong. Here for example is what is arguably the most famous sentence in all of Dickens, the opening lines of A Tale of Two Cities:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

Here's the same sentence as it would be rewritten according to Bill Strunk's schoolmarmly dicta:

The times were good in some ways, bad in others.

The book is excellent for improving inept writers and a priceless primer for students; but it's mainly useless for improving the art of writers who already know their way around words and have an ear for them, and have honed their chops enough that their innate personal style has already emerged. The writing of most of the greatest stylists, including White, would be hacked to bits by the thorough application of much of Strunk's advice.

As I keep promising to stop sayin', just sayin'.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2016 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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David Dyer-Bennet: "You're right, of course. But that statement is true of every writing book—except for the ones that fail by not being good even for that. The books really only try to get you to understand some general principles, and they're good to follow—unless you're a master practitioner of writing, in which case you're expected to strike out on your own. And, of course: 'If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy.' —Dorothy Parker."

William: "In my humble opinion John McPhee strikes the perfect balance between following Strunk and White and achieving a personal style. In academic and corporate environments, over the decades I experienced more writers who would benefit from applying S&W than those whose personal style suffered by well-intended (but blind) inflexible adherence to S&W. The irony of the above run-on sentence does not elude me."

John Camp: "I don't think I've ever commented on Strunk and White, though of course I've read the book a couple of times. Even the author of the best book on writing, Stephen King, recommends it. But you're absolutely right: it's often wrong. My take on it, as a professional writer, is that the book was written for Cornell students who were about to go off to Wall Street and needed to know how to write a crisp, short memo to the boss. On the other hand, it could ruin the prospects of any poet who read it."

[Our friend John Camp writes novels under the name John Sandford. —Ed.]

Bill Tyler (partial comment): "There's a recurring misconception in the comments that Strunk and White requires a skeletal approach to prose. If we look at the famous 'Omit needless words,' prescription from the 1918 edition (via bartleby.com—there was only Strunk in that edition) we find: 'Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.' So we have a topic sentence, then a sentence with four parallel thoughts. Finally, there's a caution that the principle is not brevity or lack of detail, but efficiency. Each word should contribute to the overall thought.

"What Strunk is advocating is avoidance of useless fluff. The Dickens passage follows this precept admirably. It even mirrors the structure of the Strunk paragraph, with pairs of parallels elaborating the theme. Each pair of contradictions expresses the paradox of the times from a different perspective, and each contributes to building the overall theme of the paragraph."

Please Remember TOP

It's five days till Christmas, four days till Hanukkah.

When you try to sell things to keep the lights on and the rent paid, it can backfire, because we all get "marketed to" too often and too much anyway. So I try to keep the general implorings and beseechments down, lest I pester you and make a pest of myself. Howe'er, just a reminder: if you be procuring procurements for the seasonality of the season, please remember TOP and clicketh on our clickers, pretty please! I mean B&H Photo and Amazon US and Amazon UK and the others. (Note that links only work for items you choose and purchase in the same visit—not for anything on your Wish List or already in your cart.) Like other such businesses such as they may be, we need December to help carry certain other ratty months (I'm looking at you, Miserable March and Anguishing [or should that be languishing?] August) too lazy to carry their own 1/12th of the year.

Thanks for remembering ol' TOP, here to please. Happy Holidays to you and yours.

—Mike, TOP CFO*

*Chief Fundraising Officer

Original contents copyright 2016 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Fuji Is the New Leica

The Fujicron on the "Leica M" of today. The silver-lens-on-black-body
was a classic "look" on old rangefinders.

Speaking of lenses, as I was in the previous post, don't forget that the avidly anticipated "Fujicron" (that's what they're calling it, out there on the wilds of the Internet) ships on January 16th.

You might want to preorder now.

"-Cron," if you're new to all this, is the traditional Leitz—now Leica—suffix meaning an ƒ/2 lens. The 35mm Summicron was traditionally the optimum, the top, lens of choice for a film Leica rangefinder.

A few Leicaphiles here and there are whimpering that the XF 23mm ƒ/2 WR—that's the Fujicron, and it's a 35mm-equivalent in angle of view—is not quite Fuji's sharpest lens. Really? You worry about that? Every lens is sharp enough these days. I almost long for the days when there were real sharpness differences in lenses...differences you could detect without fastidiousness, pixel-peeping, and dedicated tests. It's harder than ever being a lens nut these days. They're all just too good.

For example, I read a review of the new "pride leader" lens from Canon the other day—the show-the-world EF 35mm ƒ/1.4L II ($1,649)—that concluded it was marginally better than the Sigma 35mm ƒ/1.4 Art lens ($899)...because you could see slight differences if you looked closely in the extreme corners at the widest aperture.

That's where we are? Making distinctions based on vanishingly small differences like that? It's always fun and gratifying to own whichever lens nourishes your enthusiasm, and I'm not against the Canon or any other fine lens. (Quite the opposite—my tagline used to be "you can never spend too much money for your lenses.") But the hope that such qualities will distinguish actual pictures is probably imaginary now.

Makes me a bit sad, actually. It was so much fun back in the dimly-remembered days of yore to actually see lens quality in pictures without the present-day magnifying glass of pixel-peeping.

Now we pick lenses based on different criteria. Color fringing (fixable in post). Bokeh. Size, weight, and handling. Physical features like weather and water resistance. All the things, in other words, that make the new Fujicron absolutely perfect on the X-Pro2.

If the Fuji X-Pro2 is the Leica M of this millennium—not a stretch by any stretch—then the Fujicron is the ideal normal-lens for it. Perfect mates. Match made in heaven. Get in line!

Mike

Original contents copyright 2016 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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John Camp: "I hate to say it, given my current satisfaction with my GX8s, but that may be the prettiest combo of camera and lens I've ever seen. I'm not sure 'pretty' is a good enough reason to spend money, but it's definitely one reason you might. If it was a 4:3 aspect ratio, I probably would."

Bill Poole: "Having owned Leica M cameras and loved the 35mm ƒ/2 'Cron, I was quick to order the ƒ/2 Fuji lens, black version, earlier this year. It is now part of the three-lens set for my X Pro2 with the ƒ/2 35mm and the 27mm ƒ/2.8 pancake lens (which is really very wonderful and compact and pretty much the exactly right focal length for many situations.) To fund the purchase of the ƒ/2 lenses, I sold the ƒ/1.4 versions of the same lenses. Were those 'sharper?' I don't know—the 35mm ƒ/1.4 is a brilliant lens. But to me the trade off for the 'right-sized' primes for the X-Pro form-factor was worth it, and the lenses are very solid performers.

"This lightweight combo is very Leica-like in size and use and has left me in the hard-to-comprehend position of not hungering for a new camera or lens—the first time that has been the case in many years."

David Lee: "As we all know, you never, ever put a chrome lens on a black body. You can put a black lens on a chrome body but not the other way around. Basic Leica knowledge. Having said that, I love my X-Pro2. My M's are collecting dust."

Harry Teasley: "As a Leica user, you want to call your setup a SLOBB: Silver Lens On Black Body. Just FYI. But more seriously, since when is 35mm 'normal'?"

Mike replies: Harry check out this graphic from DPReview's Canon EF 35mm ƒ/1.4 II review:

...Underlining mine.

I meant that a 35mm is the best "main" lens on a rangefinder or rangefinder-style camera...we actually polled this once, years ago, at C&D magazine, and the 35mm Summicron beat out the 50mm Summicron as the most used and most owned lens. It is indeed more accurate to describe it as a "moderate wide angle" though.

Andre Y: "I've tried a few of those lenses on the list, and I think many of them tend to be very good lenses for a very specific thing, with a couple of notable exceptions. Here are my impressions of four that I either own or have shot extensively.

"The Sigma 50–100mm ƒ/1.8 coupled with a Nikon D500 makes for one of the best stage photography systems you can get: focus is fast and accurate, and works across every focus point, performance wide open is good, and the focal lengths it covers is perfect for either shooting from the wings or from the first few rows of seats. Its flaring character leaves a bit to be desired, but its focus breathing and non-parfocalness is a non-issue in that application. It is heavy and somewhat awkward to hold, so be sure to do your pushups!

"The Nikon 105mm ƒ/1.4E is definitely the best short telephoto Nikon has ever made. It has very low levels of longitudinal CA and is very sharp across its frame, along with very nice bokeh too. You do pay though: it's large, heavy, expensive, and slow to focus. It's the ultimate example of Nikon's dual-personality lenses: wide-open for flattering portraits and stopped down great landscapes.

"The Nikon 19mm PC-E is the mechanical apotheosis of Nikon's tilt-shift line. We finally get to change tilt and shift axes without disassembling the lens, and the controls are mechanically less fiddly and more secure than before. Optically, there's not much more one can ask from this lens: it is very good. Its large bulbous front element does make me very nervous whenever I remove its lens cap though. It goes without saying that this is lens is highly specialized: if you need to ask whether you need it, you don't.

"The sleeper in that group is the Tamron 85mm ƒ/1.8. It does everything well, and has no real weakness. One might carp about its slight focus shift, or size compared to other ƒ/1.8 85mm lenses, but there's little else to talk about. It actually focuses faster than the Nikon 85mm ƒ/1.8G, has much less color fringing (the non-correctable longitudinal kind AKA bokeh fringing), and the vibration control even works, though it will visibly reduce your microcontrast. Sharpness is about the same as the Nikkor, but more even throughout the frame, and the lens has a pleasing character both in its out-of-focus and in-focus areas.

"It's really been an embarrassment of riches for lenses in 2016."

Mike replies: Wow, those are some great thumbnail mini-reviews Andre. Thanks!

Abhishek: "I bought this combo in black the first day I could and replaced my X100T. Weather sealing played the biggest part in that decision. Living in Vancouver, we get a lot of rainy days and now I can freely walk around with this delightful combo with no worries of it dying in the drizzle. It is perhaps the first compact sealed combo around. Something overlooked by most other manufacturers. I've been waiting a long time for this!"

Carsten Bockermann: "I wholeheartedly agree that 'Fuji is the new Leica.' More than nine and a half years ago, when you wrote about the Leica M8, I commented 'To continue the Leica tradition of small, fast cameras with truly excellent lenses, I think we need a new system designed from scratch.' Fuji has built exactly that."

DPReview's Best Lens of 2016 Contest

You might have seen Digital Photography Review's "Best Lenses" contests. This year they've got one contest for zooms and another for primes.

The problem with such polls, of course, is that they are popularity/status contests, not real data; but hopefully everyone understands that and just accepts the spirit of fun. Mostly, people would just vote for whichever lens they either know, or just want.

I haven't gotten to know all the lenses on the list. I doubt anyone has, even people who work at DPReview. Even people who have tried all the lenses haven't gotten to know them all (it's a different thing).

But I fancy I've acquired a pretty acute "ear to the ground" sense over many years of writing and editing commentary about photo equipment. Jerry Seinfeld talks about how a comedian learns to "sense" an opinion that the audience has about a certain joke—that is, there's no overt sign or communication, but the comedian intuits the reaction. I know what he means. If I read enough discussions and hear enough comments about a product, I start to get a picture—which I believe would be valid even if I'd never used the product or seen any results from it. It's the same thing we all do when researching a product, but with stakes, because I'll get punished to some degree if I turn out to be wrong.

Such a sense might be subject, of course, to various sampling and perception errors; granted. And my method takes longer—I'm usually a little bit behind the news.

Still, I can provisionally get behind the winner of last year's poll, the Zeiss Batis 85mm. In that case I've seen a lot of results from it, albeit only online. But I've also heard a lot about it from users, and the praise it gets seems genuine. As good as the greats from the past.

Which lens would be your pick?

Mike

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Mark Muse: "I have the Batis 85mm. And the Zeiss 85mm ƒ/2.8 Sonnar Contax/Yashica, and a Zeiss 90mm ƒ/2.8 Sonnar G. I did a bake-off recently. To my surprise the rendering of all three was almost identical. The 90 G was slightly the sharpest and a bit more contrasty than the others. The Batis has the most CA. This on the Sony A7r2. I bought the Batis for shooting people in motion, for which it excels because of the excellent autofocus. The 90 G is my landscape lens at this focal length.

"The kind of poll you are writing about is pretty useless for me unless it includes an accurate description of the lens imaging characteristics, from which I can determine if it fills a niche for me. Popularity is meaningless unless one is concerned about resale on down the road. Even that is fickle."

Moose (partial comment): "Strange...what is clearly the best zoom of 2016, the Panasonic-Leica 100–400mm, isn't even available to vote for. I have thousands of shots with that lens, and it's spectacular. Beyond that, it's actually new ground, not a new version of an old focal-length range. It allows the photographer to do things that couldn't be done before. Handheld 800mm-e, anyone?"

Mike replies: Bingo! There's the Lens of the Year right there. A good choice.

The Improvement Law and the Resignation Imperative

Postulate 1: Every camera can be improved.

Postulate 2: Every camera could be changed in specific ways to improve it for any given gear geek user.

How many times in your life have you ever said, or thought, "I like [x camera]. But I wish it [had/didn't have] x"? Q.E.D.

The Keppler Axiom, named for Burt Keppler, is:

The more cameras you've tried or used, the more acute Postulate 2 becomes.

Mr. Keppler wrote, in one* of his many columns in Modern Photography and Popular Photography magazines, that his "ideal camera" would cobble together many of the features he had liked best from a great many of the different cameras he had tried...which were great in number. This feature from this camera, that feature from that camera. Add them all together to get the camera he thought would be perfect.

However, that last sentence ignores The Persistence Corollary of the Improvement Law, which is:

Even the perfect camera can still be improved!

This seems illogical, but it is true. Use the perfect camera for long enough, and you will say, "Hmm, I like [x camera]. But I wish it [had/didn't have] x."

This leads us, finally, to The Resignation Imperative:

The best camera for you will still have a few things that you wish were different.

Resign yourself to this: it's not a flaw in the equipment, it's just a manifestation of the Improvement Law, which is an immutable law of the Universe. It will always be true. We must learn to accept Postulate 2 as part and parcel of humans being human and cameras being cameras.

Viz., I like the Panasonic GX8, but I wish it had a flip-up viewing screen, like the Fujis, rather than a flip-out (AKA articulated) one. I like flip-up screens better.  :-)

The Improvement Law in action. C'est la vie.

Mike

ADDENDUM: I forgot to add The Antidote to the Persistence Corollary of the Improvement Law, which is: the more work you like that you make with a given camera, the more you will like that camera, regardless of its features or flaws.

* The column is lost to history. I have made quite an effort to find it, including contacting Burt's old right-hand man, retired Popular Photography Editor-in-Chief Jason Schneider. No one can find it. It did exist, that much I know; it featured a drawing of Mr. Keppler's imaginary unicorn camera with the shutter-button on the front rather than the top. But the column is lost.

Original contents copyright 2016 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Merle: "Um, kind of applies to just about everything—the body (as in human), the spouse, the house, the car, what I had for breakfast, the weather (expected –13°F tonight, yikes!), ad nauseam. Doesn't mean we can't be happy with what we have at the moment and enjoy that moment for what it is."

Kenneth Tanaka: "The Tanaka Identity Postulate: 'Whatever you use, there you are.' (A variant of 'wherever you go'). That is, at any given moment and situation you will take fundamentally the same picture with any camera, regardless of its sophistication."

MikeR: "Had I known the LX100 was coming out, I would not have bought the GX7, as the former does everything I want that the latter does...EXCEPT!!...I wish the viewfinder tilted up (thus proving your point)."

G.Watson: "More Keppler gems."